And the Nominees Are… (2024)
We’ve got our nominees.
Last year (and probably the year before), I felt like I had zero time to prepare or get things in order, and I basically went into predictions cold and just sort of guessed, wrote it out once and left it at that. This year, I knew I wasn’t gonna bother putting up all the precursors as they came in and instead just built my predictions as we went along. So at least I was able to put thought into most of it. I will say, though, very little time and effort went into the Shorts categories. And boy, does it show (we’ll get to it).
I watched the nominations as they happened this morning, and very little made me surprised. Which I guess is what I hope for when doing this every year. The most I saw was ‘oh, that got left off there and that got on there’. Nothing like, “Where the fuck did that come from?” But I also saw them, made mental notes, then went on with my day and completely forgot about everything for 12 hours. So I’m only now just sitting down to process everything. So let’s see how this all shook out and what actually things of note are worth mentioning. (more…)
Oscars 2024: The B+ Nominations Ballot
Oh hey, it’s that time again. I’ll disappear for almost a whole year, but you know I’m gonna be here for this. This is my Super Bowl.
I will say, I bet the Academy is real glad to have Wicked up there this year because this is fixing to be the most niche set of nominees in a while. This year is gonna be for psychos like me and definitely not for casual viewers. And not even just financially speaking. I don’t care about that. I mean that four major (likely) Best Picture nominees are The Brutalist, Emilia Pérez, Anora and The Substance. Wild.
Anyway, let’s get guessing. (more…)
And the Nominees Are… (2023)
I’m sure I said the same thing last year, but I had no idea what to expect with this one. Last year I was in the middle of life chaos and all of a sudden it was like “time for awards season!” This year, no chaos, but all of a sudden it was December and January and these things were out and I had barely finished watching things from the year and had to scramble to get halfway caught up on the shorts and documentaries and foreign films (and even then, I’m not sure I got to halfway) and then, within the span of like, three weeks, find out where everything was at and find the time to throw together nominations guesses.
I posted my predictions article yesterday without having had the time to look over anything a second time, convinced I was gonna do horribly. I thought, “Okay, if I can go 68-70%, I can escape feeling okay.” Both fortunately and unfortunately for me, it’s been the same 10 films all over the ballot. Which is good, since it cuts down on having to think about random stuff getting on and makes you feel like you’ve got a baseline of doing okay. But it’s also bad bad because you can fall into the trap of accidentally guessing the same five films to get more nominations than is reasonably possible.
I saw the nominations, but I haven’t yet gone through and seen what the totals are for everything and looked at the big picture. And I bet, once I do, we’ll end up with everything largely in the range of getting a number of nominations that ‘make sense’ for them. And that’s mostly what I’m gonna be looking for here, since, by and large, there weren’t a lot of ‘oh WOW’ moments for me. A couple of snubs, a couple of ‘oh, okay, they nominated that’. But, to me, the only nomination or omission that moved the needle for me happened in Sound. So it seems like a pretty straightforward year and I’m sure I didn’t actually do as horrible as it felt like I did. As I say — there’s always a certain percentage of this that’s going to be unknowable chaos. You have to expect that. So anything within the chaos range is understandable.
Anyway, let’s take a look at what was nominated and what it all means going forward (and, most importantly, how I did in guessing everything). (more…)
Oscars 2023: The B+ Nominations Ballot
Oh, hello there.
Guess it’s time to be picking Oscar nominees again. Better put on my cardigan and lace up the old sneakers.
This year feels even stranger than last year. There was a time about five years ago where, if I hadn’t seen every single movie by December 30th (even the insignificant ones), I was freaking out (I once went to a theater on December 28th to see Just Getting Started in 2017. That’s how much I had to make sure I saw everything). Now I’m like, “Ehh, haven’t seen two or three of the top films? Fine. The Top Ten list can go up in February.”
But in terms of this stuff — I’m at the point where I basically just roll out of bed for it. Not totally, because I do love it, so I do try to track it as much as I can and talk about it as often as I can. I just don’t have the time to devote to it like I did previously, so a lot of tit just gets rushed. Which is a shame, but at least I still get to do this. I do really enjoy this.
Fortunately I’ve been doing this for so long (and so much of this is based on empirical data anyway) that quite literally almost anyone can do this well if they care to. It’s 70% precursors, 20% doing it enough to know how things usually go (and learning to remove what you want to see from the equation as much as possible) and 10% unknowable chaos that’s gonna happen no matter how much you try to prevent it. I’m here because I love this and because I hope people, through reading this, can see how not difficult this is to do well even with a minimal amount of prep.
So, as we always do, let’s try to guess all the nominees tomorrow and see how well we do. (more…)
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